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These moments of missed connection arrive in the reader’s hands full of emotional resonance. For readers, it’s classical dramatic irony at its best. They arrive at points of no return, and turn around as if bewildered at how they got there.
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Characters mistake moments of abandonment for moments of closeness, and we hope helplessly that they won’t do That One Thing as they’re drifting inescapably toward a mistake. Again and again, readers watch the excruciating moments when relationships begin to dissolve and when a long-sought-after connection slips through grasping fingers. These moments are akin to unrequited love, but it’s often an identity recognition or community love rather than a solely romantic one. There’s a lot of tenderness in their realism - not in the superficial way that “tender” gets bandied about lately, but a profound affection for the ways that queerness involves reaching for the unattainable as we continually grow toward the sun. From middle school to middle age, no one can accuse Lydia Conklin of not having the range.Ĭonklin’s greatest skill, however, is resisting the urge for wish fulfillment. There are magnificent portrayals of queer youth and intergenerational queer community, with all its attendant friction and pressure. Highlight premises include “Sunny Talks” (a closeted nonbinary aunt takes their trans nephew to a trans YouTube convention, encountering a younger generation living lives that would have been unimaginable during their own childhood), “Laramie Time” (a gay couple in Laramie try for a child while navigating the secrets and expectations in their relationship), and “Counselor of My Heart” (a tragic accident by a negligent girlfriend threatens to derail a grad school relationship before it can even really begin).
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Highlight characters include the protagonists of “Pioneer” (a middle schooler shedding gender and decorum during a school activity day), “A Fearless Moral Inventory” (a recovering sex addict staves off relapse and learns who in her life she cares enough about to truly trust), and “Cheerful Until Next Time” (a trans man in a queer literature book club has a risky idea for how to confess his love to a classmate). For me, the highlights of this collection gathered into clusters. Repeatedly, and through a variety of lenses, we follow behind characters fucking around and finding out. After all, isn’t that what we do when we are so curdled by our desperation that we accept proximity to what we want at any cost?įlirting with risk and connection, Rainbow Rainbow’s stories are connected by this thread of experimentation. Whether it’s a sex-addicted librarian in recovery, a negligent girl who is wild about her girlfriend and less so about the girlfriend’s dog, or uneasy children in over their heads at their first house party, Conklin’s protagonists are the sidelong queers at the periphery of their lives, whose response to getting in too deep is to go even deeper. Over and over but without growing samey, Conklin’s collection repeats and refines this formula. The tensions in each thread hold the others taut this cat’s-cradle effect is the hallmark of my favorite collections of short fiction, especially as you move through a collection and see the strands pulling, so that what began as a tangle becomes an intricately variegated web. There is so, so much to love in this collection: its melancholic realism, its desperate and heartfelt protagonists, its narrative willingness to follow through with consequences rather than to flinch from the implications of a story’s action. This debut collection from Lydia Conklin shows us queer life in all its vulnerability, frailty, and growing pains, and it holds off despair through gestures of hope and connection in unlikely places, against the odds. Like the imaginary band that gives this collection its name, Rainbow Rainbow is fiction-as-talisman. Kim’s stories of her old life at her old school are, for Heidi, signals from a world that doesn’t exist, where she’s better connected than she is, where she can be charismatic by extension, where she can reach out and touch the life she dreams of.
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These stories don’t need to be true to offer her a reprieve from her sheltered sidekick life. Surrounded by people she imagines as older, more sophisticated, and more comfortable in their queerness than herself, she clings to the stories of her bolder, brazen best friend Kim as talismans. “She had this band? Rainbow Rainbow? Their music made other girls gay,” insists Heidi, a teenage girl in the penultimate story of Lydia Conklin’s debut collection. The 200 Best Lesbian, Bisexual & Queer Movies Of All Time.LGBTQ Television Guide: What To Watch Now.